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EHES WORKING PAPERS IN ECONOMIC HISTORY | NO. 31

Rearmament to the Rescue?

New Estimates of the Impact of ‘Keynesian’ Policies in

1930s’ Britain

Nicholas Crafts

University of Warwick

Terence C. Mills

Loughborough University

NOVEMBER 2012

EHES Working Paper | No. 31 | November 2012

Rearmament to the Rescue?

New Estimates of the Impact of ‘Keynesian’ Policies in

1930s’ Britain

Nicholas Crafts

University of Warwick

Terence C. Mills

Loughborough University

Abstract We report estimates of the fiscal multiplier for interwar Britain based on quarterly data, time-

series econometrics, and ‘defense news’. We find that the government expenditure multiplier

was in the range 0.5 to 0.8, much lower than previous estimates. The scope for a Keynesian

solution to recession was much lower than is generally supposed. We do find that rearmament

gave a substantial boost to real GDP after 1935 but this was because the private sector

responded to news of massive future defense spending and does not imply that the multiplier

effect of temporary public works programs would have been large.

JEL codes: E62; N14

Keywords: defense news; multiplier; public works; rearmament

Notice

The material presented in the EHES Working Paper Series is property of the author(s) and should be quoted as such.

The views expressed in this Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the EHES or

its members

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Mark Harrison, Tim Hatton, Michael McMahon, Roger Middleton, George Peden,

Valerie Ramey, and KenWallis for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

1

1. Introduction

The financial crisis of 2008/9 and the difficulties in escaping from recession since the crisis have re-

awakened interest in Keynesian economic policies. This suggests that the time is right for a

reappraisal of the British experience in the 1930s. This is a period with considerable relevance for

today, in particular because from 1932 onwards it was an era of very low nominal interest rates,

during which an initial phase of fiscal consolidation was superseded by rearmament financed partly

by borrowing. The size of the fiscal multiplier in such conditions is of obvious interest to today’s

policymakers, just as it has been to economic historians working on the macroeconomics of interwar

Britain.

The existing literature on this issue dates mainly from the 1980s. Much of the historiography

focuses on the issue of the possible impact of public expenditure proposals made by Maynard

Keynes and Hubert Henderson with a view to reducing unemployment, which were taken up by the

Liberal Party under David Lloyd George at the 1929 general election.1 Estimates of the government-

expenditure multiplier of 0.98 in the short-run and 1.44 in the long-run were obtained by T. Thomas

based on a simulation of a Keynesian macro-econometric model, and Stephen Broadberry’s

estimation of an IS-LM model gave a value of 1.22 for the fiscal multiplier.2 Mark Thomas looked at

the impact of rearmament using an approach based on an input-output table and a social accounting

matrix which assumes no crowding out and concluded that the government expenditure multiplier

was 1.64 in 1935 and 1.60 in 1938.3 Timothy Hatton surveyed this literature and based his analysis

of the Keynes-Henderson proposals on a range of values between 1.25 and 1.75 for the multiplier.4

A later contribution by Nicholas Dimsdale and Nicholas Horsewood, which incorporated aggregate

supply with a high degree of nominal inertia as well as aggregate demand into a macro-econometric

model for the interwar period, concludes that the short run multiplier was about 1.5 and the long

run as much as 2.5.5 All of these authors explicitly or implicitly conclude that Lloyd George could not

have done it, i.e., that the impact of government expenditure on employment would have been

considerably lower than claimed by Keynes and Henderson. On the other hand, Mark Thomas

argued that additional defence expenditures produced over a million jobs in 1938 compared with

1935.6

For all these papers a key issue is the size of the fiscal multiplier. Yet the methods they employed to

obtain estimates of the multiplier are open to challenge and are not those which would be used by

macroeconomists today. The models they rely upon basically embody Keynesian ideas in their

specification with a traditional consumption function and may not adequately reflect crowding out,

with the implication that the estimated multipliers are too large. For example, models in either the

neoclassical or new Keynesian traditions which embody optimizing behaviour by forward-looking

1Keynes and Henderson, Can Lloyd George Do It?; Liberal Party, We Can Conquer Unemployment. The Liberal

Party did not win the election and the proposals were not implemented.2

Thomas, “Aggregate Demand”; Broadberry, British Economy between the Wars.3

Thomas, “Rearmament”.4

Hatton, “Outlines of a Keynesian Solution”.5

Dimsdale and Horsewood, “Fiscal Policy”.6

Thomas, “Rearmament”.

2

households typically expect consumer expenditure to fall rather than increase in response to an

increase in government expenditure and envisage that the multiplier may be less than 1.7

Given that theoretical predictions are model-dependent it is important to let the data speak and,

since the seminal paper by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti, vector autoregression (VAR)

techniques have often been used to estimate multipliers from quarterly macroeconomic time series,

although many economists prefer to base their ideas of the value of the multiplier on the results of

calibrations of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, where an interesting aspect is

how far these may vary according to the state of the economy.8 The big problem in estimating

multipliers using VARs is the validity of the identification assumptions that are made, in particular,

whether government expenditure can be treated as exogenous and unanticipated.9 It is fair to say

that the use of these techniques has produced quite a wide range of estimates of the size of the

government-expenditure multiplier for the post-war American economy, with a recent authoritative

survey concluding that it probably lies between 0.8 and 1.5.10

Seeking to build a convincing DSGE model for the interwar British economy would be an ambitious

undertaking. However, it is now possible to revisit the question of the size of the fiscal multiplier

using time-series econometrics rather than relying on a traditional macroeconomic model, as has

been the practise hitherto, thanks to the development of a quarterly series for real GDP for the

interwar UK economy by James Mitchell, Solomos Solomou and Martin Weale.11 This is the focal

point of the present paper. In undertaking this task, we make use of a new idea proposed by Valerie

Ramey to address the potential endogeneity of government expenditure.12 She argues for the use of

changes in the present value of expected future defense spending and both she and Robert Barro

and Charles Redlick have implemented this approach to estimating the government-expenditure

multiplier in recent papers.13 Their estimates vary a bit according to the sample period used but for

the postwar era both papers suggest a range of 0.6 to 0.8.

We construct a defense-news variable from contemporary sources and develop a similar analysis for

interwar Britain. We use the results to provide a reappraisal of the claims in the historiography

relating to the possible impact on real GDP both of the hypothetical Lloyd George fiscal stimulus, or

‘the Keynesian solution’, and of the actual rearmament program.

2. Defense News

The aim of ‘Defense News’ is to reflect changes to planned government defense expenditure

previously unanticipated by the public. This variable can be thought of as capturing exogenous

shocks to a key component of government spending. The series for changes in the expected present

value of government expenditure on defense for the United Kingdom in the interwar period has

7For a convenient summary of predictions from a variety of macroeconomic models see Hebous, “The Effects

of Discretionary Fiscal Policy”.8

Blanchard and Perotti, “Empirical Characterization”. For a recent example of a DSGE model where themultiplier is much higher when nominal interest rates are at the lower bound because fiscal stimulus lowersreal interest rates, see Christiano et al., “When is the Government”.9

See the discussion in Ramey, “Can Government Purchases”.10

Ibid., p. 683.11

Mitchell et al., “Monthly GDP Estimates”.12

Ramey, “Identifying Government Spending Shocks”.13

Ibid., Barro and Redlick, “Macroeconomic Effects”.

3

been constructed using a similar method to that employed by Ramey.14 The key place from which

information was taken is The Economist magazine, which was published weekly through the interwar

period. This source gives details of defense estimates, which were usually published in government

papers in February and March each year, but there were sometimes also supplementary estimates.

The Economist gave a detailed yearly account of actual spending at the time of the annual budget in

April and published quarterly running totals at the beginning of January, April, July and October each

year, and it also regularly commented on the prospects for defense spending in editorials and in

featured news items.

The statistical information obtained from The Economist has been cross-checked against the detailed

descriptions of British budgets provided by Bernard Mallet and Oswald George and by Basil Sabine.15

Interpretation of the commentary of The Economist has been facilitated by the accounts in the major

historical studies of military policy such as those of John Ferris and George Peden.16 The general

pattern of the news is quite clear but, of course, there is a margin of error in the details. At times,

there was considerable uncertainty, not simply for agents in the private sector but also among

policymakers, as to what would happen both with regard to magnitudes and timing, especially in the

early 1920s and the late 1930s, and judgment calls are unavoidable. Expected values have been

calculated at 1938 prices for a horizon of five years using a discount rate of 5.1 per cent.17

Estimates of ‘Defense News’ are reported in Table 1. A full discussion of how the ‘defense news’

variable was constructed can be found elsewhere.18 Here we provide the context, comment on the

main developments, and describe an example of a key episode to give an idea of how the approach

was implemented.

The interwar period started with disarmament in the context of fiscal consolidation to address issues

of fiscal sustainability following the explosion of the public debt during and immediately after World

War I. In 1919, the government set out its view that ‘normal expenditure’ on the fighting forces

would be £93.5 million per year.19 This was on the basis of the ’10-Year Rule’ that no expeditionary

force would be required for a great war in that time. The interpretation of this rule was, however,

disputed in the context of budget planning, with one interpretation being that each service had to

be ready for a major conflict by 1929 or, alternatively, that preparations could not begin until 1929

at the earliest. The struggle between the Treasury and the armed forces lasted until 1927 when

spending reached a steady-state level of £108 million.20

During this first phase, the main news was as follows. In the spring of 1920, the defence estimates

seem to be on track to reach the stated normal peacetime figure of £93.5 million by fiscal year

14Ramey, “Defense News Shocks”. The estimates made there are used in Ramey, “Identifying Government

Spending Shocks” as a key ingredient for her method of estimating the fiscal multiplier.15

Mallet and George, British Budgets, 1913-14 to 1920-21 and British Budgets, 1921-22 to 1932-33; Sabine,British Budgets.16

Ferris, Men, Money, and Diplomacy; Peden, British Rearmament.17

Figures in current prices have been converted to constant 1938 prices using the monthly retail price index inCapie and Collins, The Interwar British Economy, Table 2.13 and the discount rate is 1.25% per quarter.18

Crafts, “UK Defence News”.19

British Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 376. All figures for defence spending have been converted to 1938prices. Fiscal years then, as now, began in April each year.20

The dispute between the Treasury and the armed forces over the interpretation of the 10-year rule isreviewed in Ferris, Men, Money, and Diplomacy.

4

1921/22 but in 1920Q4 a supplementary estimate was announced. In February 1921, The Economist

forecast that for next year defence spending, in real terms, would remain at the level of the second

half of 1920/1 but it expressed scepticism that the government had the will to reduce rapidly

defence spending in the face of resistance by the military. The April budget confirmed these

predictions for fiscal year 1921/2. The defence news shock in 1921Q1 is based on the assumption

that further cuts would be postponed until 1922/3 and would be implemented slowly thereafter,

reaching the £93.5 million target only at the end of fiscal year 1925/6. However, in August 1921, the

Lloyd George government appointed the independent Geddes Committee with a mandate to find

£100 million, at current prices, in budget cuts. The Economist immediately predicted both that the

vast majority would fall on defence and that the politicians would not go through with the full £100

million (as happened when the Committee reported six months later). The defence news shock in

1921Q3 assumes that the post-Geddes settlement is predicted at that point with the steady-state of

£93.5 million now expected for 1924/5. The positive defence news shock of 1923Q2 reflects the new

defence estimates, which were seen to reflect a slowing of the cutbacks as new equipment

programmes were approved by the new Baldwin government for the Air Force and the Navy, which

had successfully argued for speeding up preparations for the next major conflict. Two years later,

the defence estimates appeared to have abandoned any intention to cut further and a new

investment programme for cruisers for the Navy was expected.

The second phase covers the period through 1934. Until 1932 there is little to report, but then the

10-Year Rule was cancelled in March following the invasion of Manchuria and the attack on Shanghai

by Japan. The defence estimates for 1932/33 were £115 million and new naval construction is on

the agenda, while Neville Chamberlain (Chancellor of the Exchequer) was contemplating a rise of

defence expenditure of a further 10 per cent by 1935.21 In 1933Q2 the defence estimates further

increased in the context of a new naval construction programme and The Economist regretted the

‘retrograde tendency’ that it detected towards an increase in defence expenditure. By 1934, there

were the first signs of fears about Germany and in 1934Q2 the cabinet announced new squadrons for

the Air Force with a 5-year programme of spending on new aircraft. So, the end of this second phase

saw the still modest beginnings of a new military build-up. The positive defence news shock of

1932Q2 assumes that Chamberlain’s expectation was shared by the public.

The third phase was one of vigorous rearmament with Britain moving to a quasi-war footing from

1937 onwards. The new policy was announced, but with no spending commitments, in the Defence

White Paper of March 1935.22 This statement simply said that additional expenditure on the

armaments of the defence services could no longer safely be postponed. The quarterly spending

numbers did not reflect this until 1935Q3 when spending surged to be 31 per cent above the level of

a year earlier, as reported in The Economist of October 5, 1935.

This is a good opportunity to consider an example with regard to the news of an increase of £178.2

million (1938 prices) reported for 1935Q2 in Table 1 using text from the working paper, as follows:23

“ March 16, 1935: The Economist reviews the future of defence spending in a lead editorial following

Defence Estimates and a Defence White Paper of March 11, 1935 (Cmd. 4827). This paper has

21Peden, British Rearmament, p. 67.

22British Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 4827.

23Crafts, “UK Defence News”.

5

announced a new policy of rearmament but with no spending commitments. It simply said that

additional expenditure on the armaments of the defence services could no longer safely be

postponed. The Economist thinks that this will entail a change of gear such that ‘it is certain that the

Defence Vote will show a further big increase next year’.

April 13, 1935: The budget plans envisage total estimated expenditure on defence of £124.2 million,

equivalent to £136 million at 1938 prices, as noted already. The outturn is £136.9 million as

spending jumps in 1935Q3.

It seems to be rearmament ... but it is unclear as to how much and how soon? It is difficult to

believe that anyone could at this stage be sure of the massive additional defence spending that

would occur by 1938 but, equally, everyone should be expecting a considerable increase during the

next fiscal year that will be sustained rather than transitory. David Chambers underlined the

importance of rearmament for IPOs in aircraft manufacturing at this time.24 On previous

assumptions, in 1935Q2 the projection was a constant expenditure of £34.0 million at 1938 prices

with an NPV of 606.2. By 1935Q3 defence spending at current prices is running at an annual rate of

about 30% higher than a year ago (and this carries on to the end of the fiscal year). It is apparent

that rearmament will be a lengthy process – say, at least 5 years. In the light of The Economist’s

commentary it does not seem excessive to suppose that agents expect the 1935/6 increase at this

point and believe it will be maintained for the forecast horizon even though actual spending does

not yet reflect the new policy stance. So, the expected sequence of defence expenditure at 1938

prices in 1935Q2 is taken to be £44.0 million each quarter over the horizon with an NPV = 784.4 so

the news is +178.2.”25

This example reflects a judgment call in putting precise numbers on defense spending plans, but

there is no doubt that large future increases were anticipated even though nothing had happened

yet. Failing to recognize this could undermine traditional methods of inferring the value of the fiscal

multiplier.

The defence estimate for 1936/37 published in March 1936 was £168 million (compared with £136

million a year earlier) but a big supplementary estimate was generally expected which would push

expected spending to well over £200 million according to The Economist. The press was, in effect,

largely correctly anticipating what we now know the Cabinet had agreed, namely, a total programme

of £1075 million over the period 1936-40.26 It is clear that by 1936Q1 expectations about defence

spending were vastly different from a year earlier and this is reflected in a second large positive

shock. The ante was upped considerably a year later as Table 1 reports the biggest single shock. The

event was a new Defence White Paper in February 1937, which stated that it would be imprudent to

contemplate total expenditure of less than £1500 million over the next five years, while expenditure

over the next two or three years would be greatly increased.27 This was accompanied by the

Defence Loans Act, which gave specific approval for £400 million of this to be financed by borrowing

and added credibility to the programme, which otherwise might seem to have stretched Britain’s

taxable capacity. The Economist saw this programme as certain to happen. Finally, in the run up to

24Chambers, “Going Public”.

25Crafts, “UK Defence News”, pp. 9-10.

26Peden, British Rearmament, p. 77.

27British Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 5374.

6

and immediate aftermath of the Budget of 1938 it became clear that spending would be ahead even

of the 1937 programme at least during the two years 1938/9 and 1939/40.

3. Econometric Modeling

The defense news variable that we use in our econometric modeling, news, is the series given in

Table 1 divided by the one-quarter lagged value of real GDP; news is shown in Figure 1. We begin by

employing an approach similar to that of Barro and Redlick.28 This has the following general

specification:

ti ititiiti it uGDPDnewsy controlslagged

4

1 12

4

0 10 (1)

tD is the level of defence spending while 1log ttt GDPGDPy is quarterly real GDP growth. The

sample period was selected to be 1922Q1 to 1938Q4, so avoiding the volatility of the aftermath of

World War 1, which is known to have produced a shift in the process generating GDP.29 The lag

length was set at 4 to model any seasonality present in the data (seasonally unadjusted data was

used throughout). The contemporaneous term of news was included but all other variables were

lagged to avoid problems of endogeneity. The control variables included were lags of export growth,

changes in the money multiplier, consol yields and the tax rate, and the unemployment rate.

Growth rates and changes were used to ameliorate problems caused by the non-stationarity of

many of the variables when expressed as levels. The error term tu is specified as the ARCH(1)

process 2110

2 tt uu , which effectively models the volatility of GDP growth during 1926 and

1927 and precludes the need for lagged values of GDP growth to be included as regressors: including

such lags with tu assumed to be homoskedastic leads to a significant deterioration of fit. The

volatility of GDP growth in the boom and bust after World War 1 and during 1926 and 1927 is clearly

shown in Figure 2.30

Estimates of the finally chosen specification, in which insignificant variables have been deleted, are

shown as Table 2 (the estimated coefficients of the included control variables are shown in the

Appendix as column (1) of Table A1). Using standard errors robust to possible residual

autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity, all included variables are significant and the reported

equation passes a variety of standard tests for misspecification. The news variable is significantly

positive at a lag of two quarters with a coefficient estimated to be, with one-standard error bound,

0025.00416.0 .

Barro and Redlick obtain an estimate of the defense-expenditure multiplier by taking defense news

to have an annual expenditure flow equivalent of 1/4th and so multiply β1 by 4 and add this value to

β2. Their definition is based on using annual data with single lags of the regressors, so its (dynamic

and annualized) quarterly counterpart here would be

4

1 2

4

1 116i ii i . The estimate of this

multiplier obtained from the estimates shown in Table 2 is 06.052.0 .

28Barro and Redlick, “Macroeconomic Effects”. These authors employed per cent changes of variables, rather

than first differences of logarithms, to model growth rates. Because quarterly data is used here no differencesin estimates are found if per cent changes are used.29

See, for example, Mills, “Fluctuations in UK Output”.30

1926 and 1927 were affected by the General Strike and its aftermath.

7

An attempt was then made to investigate how this multiplier might change within the sample

period. Attempts to re-estimate equation (1) for the post-1932 sub-period in order to investigate

whether the multiplier is higher for the era where interest rates were close to the zero lower bound

(ZLB) were unsuccessful, but truncating the sample period at 1932Q2 yielded a higher multiplier of

0.8, which seems contrary to this hypothesis.

Since the fit of this equation is not particularly good, with an 2R of just 0.19, it was thought that we

might do better by moving to a more general model specification. To this end a specification was

developed which relates ty again to lags of tnews , but now to lags of government spending

growth disaggregated into defence and non-defence spending, td and tdnon , and lags of non-

government spending growth, tn , all growth variables again being defined as one-quarter changes

in the logarithms:

t

i i itiitii itii itit

u

ndnondnewsy

controlslagged

4

1

4

1 43

4

1 2

4

1 10

(2)

Estimates of the finally chosen specification, in which insignificant variables have been deleted, are

shown as column (1) of Table 3 (the estimated coefficients of the included control variables are

shown in the Appendix as column (2) of Table A1).31 Again using standard errors robust to possible

residual autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity, all included variables are highly significant and the

reported equation passes a variety of standard tests for misspecification. The news variable is

significantly positive at a lag of two quarters with a coefficient estimated to be 0083.00430.0 . This

coefficient may be regarded as an estimate of the ‘direct’ multiplier of defense news on GDP, which

on an annualised basis is thus 033.0172.0 .32 The chosen specification of (2) offers a superior fit to

the Barro and Redlick model, with a much improved 2R of 0.51 and a regression standard error

some 20% lower.

However, there may also be ‘indirect’ effects present via the possible influence of news on the

various categories of spending that also influence GDP growth. Regressions of the form

4

1

4

10 i i titiitit vnewszz

were therefore estimated for d , dnon and n , these being reported in Columns (2)-(4) of

Table 3. These were then inserted into equation (2) to obtain a set of indirect multipliers and an

overall multiplier, defined as the sum of the direct and indirect multipliers, the time path of the

31Because the contemporaneous news regressor was found to be insignificant in (1), this was omitted from

the specification of (2).32

The reasoning behind this statement is as follows. If defense news is denoted X, then 1 ttt GDPXnews

and the long-run relationship between GDP growth and news is

111 0430.0log ttttttt GDPXGDPGDPGDPGDPy

so that XGDP 0430.0 is the long-run relationship.

8

direct and the total overall multipliers are shown in Figure 3. The total multiplier is calculated to be

0.130 (0.52 annualized) which is effectively reached after three years.33

The overall multiplier time path may be used to compute the monetary impact on GDP of defense

news shocks. Figure 4 shows the overall monetary impact of defense news shocks from 1925

onwards using a five-year horizon.34 By the end of 1938, defense news shocks had produced an

increase in GDP of £95 million, the rapid increase since 1934 being clearly seen.

To ascertain how the multiplier may have altered throughout the sample period, the specification

shown in column (1) of Table 2 was re-estimated using samples ending in 1932Q2 and 1934Q4, with

the multipliers being recalculated. These produced annualized overall multipliers of 0.82 and 0.67,

respectively. Again, this offers no support to the proposition that the fiscal multiplier increased

during the cheap-money period. It should be noted that ending the sample period at 1934Q4

excludes the defense news data which are subject to relative large margins for error. This implies

that finding a multiplier well below 1 is robust to excluding the largest and least certain values for

defense news; the estimate of 0.67 for this sample period is not much above the 0.52 found for the

whole period.

The equations in columns (2) and (4) are informative also in other respects. The former shows that

defense news does predict subsequent actual defense spending. The latter shows that defense

news has a negative effect on non-government spending which is indicative of crowding out. There

are no quarterly data on components of national expenditure but from 1932 there are estimates of

retail sales which can be used as a proxy for consumer expenditure. The estimates of an equation

relating defense news to retail sales are shown in Table 4. The results suggest that consumer

expenditure was reduced by expectations of future defense spending, which would be consistent

with neoclassical or new-Keynesian predictions based on negative wealth effects. Models of this

kind also predict an increase in labour inputs, which also helps generate the increase in output. We

ran regressions which showed that the rate of both ‘whole’ and ‘temporary’ unemployment had a

negative but not quite statistically significant relationship with defense news.35

4. Results

In this section we use the estimates of our preferred specification relating defense news to the

growth of real GDP to examine the impact of rearmament on economic recovery in Britain in the

1930s. We also compare the implications of our methodology with those of the best-known paper

on this topic by Thomas.36

33As the analytical form of the total multiplier is a highly non-linear function of the coefficients of the various

regressions no standard error can be calculated. However, we conjecture that it is in the region of thatcalculated for the Barro-Redlick multiplier, i.e., less than 0.1 on an annualized basis.34

These impacts were computed in the following way. If im is the ith period overall multiplier, then Figure 3

shows the five-year (20-quarter) impact computed as 20

0i iti Xm35

The p-values were 0.12 and 0.17, respectively. The issue here may well be that there was a lot of short-timeworking in interwar Britain which was quite responsive to economic conditions but not very well captured byofficial statistics; see Bowden et al., “A Very Peculiar Practice”. An implication is that output might increasethrough unmeasured reductions in ‘underemployment’.36

Thomas, “Rearmament”.

9

Table 5 sets out in more detail the estimated impact of defense news on GDP during the recovery

period already graphed in Figure 3 and also reports actual defense expenditure. Based on the total

multiplier (including the direct and indirect components), this impact averaged 7.1 percent of GDP in

1938 and amounted to £347.8 million (at 1938 prices) for the four quarters. Clearly, this estimate is

subject to a health warning because, as noted in section 2, there is some uncertainty about the

magnitude and, especially, the precise timing of defense news – although the numbers are clearly

very big - during the rearmament phase.37 Our analysis undoubtedly points to a substantial positive

impact of rearmament on real GDP by 1938 even if the exact amount cannot be known with

precision.

Nevertheless, our best-guess impact is actually quite similar to the £326.4 million increase in output

implied by Thomas’s approach on the basis of a multiplier of 1.6 times the additional defense

expenditure of £204 million in 1938 compared with 1934. The difference is, of course, that our

estimate is based on a much smaller multiplier, 0.52, but takes into account the news of very large

defense spending plans for the future. The main implication of our analysis is that the observation

of a large increase in output at a time of increased defense expenditure should probably not be

interpreted as a large Keynesian multiplier but as largely reflecting firms gearing up for anticipated

future increases in government spending.38

Is it plausible that the announcement of ambitious rearmament plans did elicit this response from

the private sector? In fact, a well-informed interpretation along similar lines already exists in the

historiography. Some years ago, A.J. Robertson argued that the main initial effect of rearmament

was to encourage growth in the construction industry as armaments manufacturers scrambled to

add capacity.39 Robertson drew attention to the impact of works and buildings expenditures in

providing demand, which sustained a vigorous expansion in construction output even as the impetus

given by private house-building stalled. In turn, Robertson drew on the contribution of William

Hornby to the official UK History of the Second World War.40 Hornby details the build-up of activity

to add capacity especially from 1936 onwards, notably in aircraft production but also entailing the

formation of three important new armaments manufacturing companies. Subsequently, Chambers’s

recent compilation of data on all interwar IPOs shows that 20 of the 27 in aircraft manufacturing

were launched between 1934Q3 and 1936Q2 when the increase in actual defense spending was still

relatively small.41

All this suggests considerable caution before accepting without qualification Thomas’s often cited

conclusion that “the success of rearmament in creating employment ... leads us to view the

eschewment of fiscal policy in the thirties as a missed opportunity”.42 Our results suggest that the

reason rearmament had a big impact was because the future spending plans were massive rather

than because there was a large fiscal multiplier. The implication is that a conventional temporary

37We have experimented with variants of the time path of the build up of defense news during 1935 and 1936

and found that the estimated total multiplier and impact are quite similar to those reported in the text.38

A similar suggestion is made by Ramey, “Can Government Purchases”, p. 680, in her discussion of claims thatAmerican rearmament had big multiplier effects in the run-up to World War II.39

Robertson, “British Rearmament”.40

Hornby, Factories and Plant.41

See the discussion of the impact of rearmament on IPOs in Chambers, “Going Public”; additional data kindlysupplied by the author.42

Thomas, “Rearmament”, p.571.

10

program of expenditure on public works of similar magnitude to the actual increase in defense

spending between 1934 and 1938 would have had a much smaller impact on GDP than Thomas’s

model seems to imply.

5. Discussion

The results of our econometric modelling are that the government expenditure multiplier in interwar

Britain was well below 1. This was found using the Barro and Redlick formulation as well as our

preferred specification. Moreover, we did not find any evidence of a high value for the multiplier

during the ‘cheap-money’ period of very low nominal interest rates. A reasonable conclusion from

our estimations is that the government expenditure multiplier was between 0.5 and 0.8. This is

much lower than the estimates in the historiography reviewed earlier; these ranged between 1.2

and 2.5. As we noted, however, those multipliers were not obtained using modern methods and are

clearly questionable. On the other hand, our estimates are quite similar to those found for the

United States using a defense-news approach.

Two reasons why the multiplier may have been quite modest even in the 1930s are the following.

First, the reason that new-Keynesian models predict a large multiplier when interest rates are at the

ZLB is that a deficit-financed increase in government spending leads expectations of inflation to

increase and provides a stimulus through falls in the real interest rate. In 1930s Britain, the decline

in real interest rates was much less dramatic than in the post-gold standard United States.43 Second,

the legacy of World War I meant that there was a high ratio of public debt to GDP. Between the late

1920s and the late 1930s this was never less than 140 per cent and peaked at nearly 180 per cent in

1933.44 Empirically, econometric evidence for the recent past finds that once the level of

government debt is over 100 per cent of GDP the response of output to government spending

shocks is very small even in deep recessions.45 Theoretically, the reason for this result may be that

expectations of large tax increases are raised by the fragility of the public finances when the debt to

GDP ratio is high.46 There seems to be stronger modern evidence for consumption reductions

stemming from ‘Ricardian-equivalence’ when the debt to GDP is above 100 per cent.47

As Roger Middleton has stressed, contemporaries, including key officials in HM Treasury, thought in

terms of ‘psychological crowding out’, in the context of deficit-financed public works programs,

through adverse effects on business confidence which might undermine investment, as a major

reason to believe that the multiplier effects would be small.48 Middleton also noted that, in the

debate on the budget in 1933, the Treasury publicly maintained that any possible expansionary

effects from an unbalanced budget might be vitiated by expectations of future tax increases and that

the strong public commitment to the balanced budget rule by government ministers meant that any

suggestion of a deficit would lead to expectations of higher taxation.

43According to estimates made by Jagjit Chadha and Nicholas Dimsdale the ex-post real long rate fell by a little

over 3 percentage points between 1934 and 1937, whereas in the United States the fall from 1933 to 1936 wasover 11 percentage points; see their paper, “A Long View”.44

Middleton, “British Monetary and Fiscal Policy”.45

Auerbach and Gorodnichenko, “Fiscal Multipliers”.46

Perotti, “Fiscal Policy in Good Times”.47

Rohn, “New Evidence”.48

Middleton, Towards the Managed Economy, ch. 8.

11

So some offset through Ricardian equivalence would not seem unreasonable, especially in an

economy in which a great deal of consumer expenditure was by the income-tax paying classes in an

economy characterized by high income inequality.49 The suggestion that news of future defense

spending might work to reduce consumption through negative wealth effects also gains credence

from estimates of the consumption function which find a significant role for wealth effects.50 None

of this, however, should be taken to imply that the 1930s recovery in Britain was triggered by an

expansionary fiscal contraction in the context of the fiscal tightening that took place in the early

1930s’ policy response to the deterioration in public finance promoted by the world economic

crisis.51 The evidence points to a positive fiscal multiplier, albeit smaller than has been generally

believed; in fact, our estimates echo the views of HM Treasury at the time, namely, that the

multiplier was positive but less than 1.52

So where did recovery come from? Insofar as it was stimulated by policy, the initial phase was based

on leaving the gold standard and ‘cheap money’. The policy stance was developed quite fully by

late-1932. It entailed low nominal interest rates and a commitment to raising the price level,

underpinned by an exchange-rate target of a 25 per cent nominal devaluation compared with the

gold-standard parity, which was enforced through intervention in the foreign exchange market.53 In

terms of the overall expansion of real GDP (25.8 percent between 1932Q2 and 1938Q4), our estimate

indicates a contribution from rearmament of about 30 per cent, building up mainly after 1935.54

The optimism of Keynes and Henderson of the impact of a late-1920s public works program on

unemployment has not been shared by quantitative economic historians. They have regarded the

claim that a £100 million program for three years would have cut unemployment by 500,000 as

implausible. In particular, as Middleton noted, this is mainly because estimates of the multiplier have

been lower than those of early Keynesians like Richard Kahn, whose best guess was 1.88, and Keynes

himself, who favoured a range of 2 to 3.55 For example, Thomas, whose estimate of the long-run

multiplier was 1.44, concluded that by the third year real GDP would be increased by £120 million

and unemployment reduced by 329,000.56 Dimsdale and Horsewood did support the idea of a

relatively large multiplier but their more detailed treatment of the labour market led them to

conclude that even though the Keynes-Henderson stimulus would have raised real GDP by £182-

£202 million by year 3, unemployment would have been reduced only by 302,000-333,000.57 Given

that to reduce unemployment to ‘normal levels’ in 1932 would have entailed cutting it by close to 3

49The top 20 per cent had 46 per cent of disposable income in 1937 while those paying income tax with

incomes above £125 per year accounted for about 2/3 of consumption according to estimates by Tibor Barna,Redistribution of Incomes.50

For evidence of strong real balance effects on consumption in 1930s Britain, see Stephen Broadberry,“Perspectives”.51

Middleton’s estimates show an increase in the constant-employment budget surplus of about 4 per cent ofGDP between 1929/30 and 1933/34; see his “British Monetary and Fiscal Policy”.52

Middleton, Towards the Managed Economy, p. 163.53

The development and implementation of this policy is well documented by Susan Howson, DomesticMonetary Management and Sterling’s Managed Float.54

The increase in real GDP is based on the estimates in Mitchell et al., “Monthly GDP Estimates”.55

Middleton, “British Monetary and Fiscal Policy”; “Kahn, “The Relation of Home Investment”; Keynes, TheMeans to Prosperity.56

Thomas, “Aggregate Demand”.57

Dimsdale and Horsewood, “Fiscal Policy”.

12

million, there is a consensus that at that point there was no possibility of a Keynesian solution to

unemployment.

Even our highest estimate of 0.8 after about three years for the government expenditure multiplier

means that we would be considerably more pessimistic about the impact of the Keynes-Henderson

program; Lloyd George would have been hard pressed to cut unemployment by much more than

200,000. So we share the consensus view that it would be unwise to have expected too much from

fiscal stimulus in the early 1930s. Moreover, insofar as there were risks that the viability of the

cheap money policy could be threatened by announcing a fiscal stimulus which might trigger a rise in

risk premia, our results suggest that this gamble was less worth taking than has hitherto been

believed.58

6. Conclusions

We have developed a new approach to estimating the government expenditure multiplier for

interwar Britain using quarterly data, time series econometrics and the concept of defense news.

This gives very different results from those found by previous researchers. Our estimates suggest a

value in the range 0.5 to 0.8 after three years compared with at least 1.2 in the earlier literature.

The methods used hitherto to estimate Keynesian multipliers for this period may not have fully

captured the crowding out of private by public expenditure.

Evidently, our estimates for the multiplier suggest that there was less scope to use public works to

raise GDP and reduce unemployment than has generally been supposed by economic historians and

by the early Keynesians. This means that we are in full agreement with earlier writers that ‘Lloyd

George could not have done it’, i.e., that a £100 million pounds program of public works annually for

three years would not have reduced unemployment by 500 million – indeed, we believe the effect

would have been much smaller than this.

In the circumstances of the early 1930s, we think contemporaries were right to worry that

attempting a significant fiscal stimulus could trigger adverse reactions which would have raised

interest rates and undermined the cheap money policy which helped to promote recovery in Britain

in the years after 1932. If there was such a trade-off between using fiscal or monetary policy to

stimulate the economy at that time, then our results tilt the balance further towards relying on

monetary policy.

Nevertheless, we find that rearmament delivered a substantial stimulus that promoted economic

recovery after 1935. Our estimate is that, in the absence of the rearmament program, real GDP in

1938 would have been about 7 per cent lower. It is important, however, to recognize that this

estimate of a large impact is based on the private sector’s response to news of large future defense

expenditure rather than on a big fiscal multiplier. If a similar amount to that disbursed on defense

had been spent on a temporary public works program in the mid 1930s, the impact on real GDP and

unemployment would have been relatively modest.

Finally, we note that macroeconomists have become more aware that the value of the multiplier

may vary according to the state of the economy. In that respect, we conjecture that a small

58Middleton sets up the government’s policy options in exactly this way, see “Monetary and Fiscal Policy”, p.

436.

13

multiplier in interwar Britain may reflect the high ratio of public debt to GDP and the worries of

private agents that increased government spending might imply large future taxes given the fragility

of public finances.

14

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17

Table 1. Defence News: Estimates of Changes in Net Present Value of Expected Defence

Expenditure (£ million, 1938 prices).

1920Q1 1927Q1 1934Q1

1920Q2 1927Q2 +2.2 1934Q2

1920Q3 1927Q3 1934Q3 +44.3

1920Q4 +36.0 1927Q4 1934Q4

1921Q1 +112.4 1928Q1 1935Q1

1921Q2 1928Q2 1935Q2 +178.2

1921Q3 -36.7 1928Q3 1935Q3

1921Q4 1928Q4 1935Q4

1922Q1 1929Q1 1936Q1 +160.0

1922Q2 1929Q2 1936Q2

1922Q3 1929Q3 1936Q3

1922Q4 -10.9 1929Q4 1936Q4

1923Q1 1930Q1 1937Q1 +393.0

1923Q2 +72.4 1930Q2 1937Q2

1923Q3 1930Q3 1937Q3

1923Q4 -0.9 1930Q4 1937Q4

1924Q1 1931Q1 1938Q1

1924Q2 -22.1 1931Q2 +7.0 1938Q2 +98.8

1924Q3 1931Q3 1938Q3 +29.1

1924Q4 1931Q4 1938Q4

1925Q1 1932Q1

1925Q2 1932Q2 +52.0

1925Q3 1932Q3

1925Q4 1932Q4

1926Q1 1933Q1

1926Q2 +0.9 1933Q2

1926Q3 1933Q3

1926Q4 1933Q4

Source: own calculations, see text.

18

Table 2. Barro and Redlick Specification Estimates

ty

constant -0.0081 [6.1]

2tnews 0.0416 [16.5]

32 tt GDPD -0.0787 [2.4]

43 tt GDPD -0.1607 [5.6]

54 tt GDPD 0.0919 [2.7]

2R 0.19

SE 0.0172

Note: Sample period is 1922Q! to 1938Q4. Figures in parentheses are robust t-ratios. SE is the

regression standard error. The estimates for the ARCH(1) error specification for equation (1) are

]3.195[1037.3ˆ 90

and ]6.4[1797.2ˆ1 .

19

Table 3. Regression Estimates: Preferred Specification

(1)

ty

(2)

td

(3)

tdnon

(4)

tn

constant 0.0027 [2.3] – – 0.0126 [2.3]

2tnews 0.0430 [5.2] – – –

4tnews – 1.3880 [4.7] 0.3416 [1.4] -0.1952 [1.9]

1 td -0.0077 [4.6] -0.7720 [8.2] – –

2 td – -0.4766 [4.4] – –

3 td – -0.3022 [2.0] – –

4 td 0.0114 [3.7] 0.3589 [4.0] – –

1 tdnon 0.0203 [9.2] – -0.3991 [4.0] –

2 tdnon -0.0321 [15.2] – -0.2906 [2.8] –

3 tdnon -0.0247 [12.2] – -0.2678 [2.6] –

4 tdnon – – 0.5359 [5.7] –

1 tn -0.2224 [32.1] –– – -0.5375 [4.6]

2 tn – – – -0.3433 [2.2]

3 tn -0.1696 [21.9] – – –

4 tn -0.0613 [8.5] – – –

2R 0.51 0.73 0.86 0.28

SE 0.0137 0.1223 0.1056 0.0424

Note: Sample period is 1922Q! to 1938Q4. Figures in parentheses are t-ratios. SE is the regression

standard error. The estimates for the ARCH(1) error specification for equation (1) are

]4.209[1037.1ˆ 90

and ]6.4[2023.2ˆ1 .

20

Table 4. Retail Sales Equation

tr

constant 0.0109 [3.8]

1tnews -0.0842 [2.1]

3 tr 0.3243 [2.7]

2R 0.33

SE 0.0115

Note: Sample period is 1933Q! to 1938Q4. Figures in parentheses are t-ratios. SE is the regression

standard error.

21

Table 5. Estimated Impact of Defense News Shocks on Real GDP (£million, 1938 prices)

GDP Impact fromDefense News(Total Multiplier)

Impact as %Real GDP

DefenseExpenditure

1932Q1 5.73 0.06 27.92

1932Q2 3.01 0.03 28.38

1932Q3 7.13 0.07 28.03

1932Q4 3.04 0.31 26.89

1933Q1 3.01 0.30 30.34

1933Q2 3.07 0.31 28.43

1933Q3 6.38 0.63 28.22

1933Q4 6.86 0.66 27.81

1934Q1 6.55 0.62 34.76

1934Q2 7.05 0.66 28.35

1934Q3 9.10 0.84 29.59

1934Q4 7.49 0.69 31.33

1935Q1 8.86 0.81 36.25

1935Q2 9.13 0.82 30.49

1935Q3 10.82 0.97 32.91

1935Q4 19.66 1.73 39.50

1936Q1 19.93 1.74 44.78

1936Q2 18.96 1.63 40.27

1936Q3 38.04 3.22 43.69

1936Q4 40.75 3.45 49.48

1937Q1 38.56 3.24 61.14

1937Q2 42.72 3.54 47.13

1937Q3 68.24 5.60 58.35

1937Q4 63.88 5.24 66.61

1938Q1 62.51 5.13 89.45

1938Q2 91.91 7.58 65.43

1938Q3 97.89 8.06 92.52

1938Q4 95.48 7.82 80.18

Sources: own calculations, see text, and data appendix for GDP and defense expenditure

22

Figure 1 Defense news divided by lagged real GDP: 1920Q2-1938Q$.

Figure 2 Quarterly growth of real GDP: 1920Q2-1938Q$.

-.1

.0

.1

.2

.3

.4

1920 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938

-15

-10

-5

0

5

10

15

1920 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938

%

23

Figure 3 Defense news multipliers (total multiplier smoothed to remove seasonal variability).

Figure 4 Effect of defence news shocks on GDP using a five-year horizon.

.00

.04

.08

.12

.16

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30

quarters

total

direct

0

20,000,000

40,000,000

60,000,000

80,000,000

100,000,000

1926 1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938

£

24

Appendix

We report in this appendix the data sources that we used for the econometric analysis together with

the estimated coefficients on the control variables for equations (1) and (2).

Data

The data sources for the variables used in the regressions are as follows:

Real GDP at 1938 prices: Mitchell et al., “Monthly GDP Estimates”, Table 2b.

Government expenditure on goods and services and on defence: as reported in The Economist on a

quarterly basis at current prices in the first issue of January, April, July and October each year,

converted into 1938 prices using the retail price index from Capie and Collins, The Interwar British

Economy, Table 2.14. Before 1921Q2, defence expenditure was inferred using the annual total

reported in Feinstein, National Income, Table 33, allocated to quarters based on army numbers

taken from General Annual Report on the British Army for years ending 30 September 1920 and

1921.

Defence News: derived as explained in Crafts, “UK Defence News”.

Exports: Capie and Collins, The Interwar British Economy, Table 5.8, converted into 1938 prices.

Tax Rate: total tax revenues/GDP from Middleton, Government versus the Market, Tables AI.1 and

AI.2

Unemployment: Capie and Collins, The Interwar British Economy, Table 4.5.

Money Multiplier: M1/monetary base from Capie and Webber, A Monetary History, Table I.2. Before

1922Q1 M1 was estimated as M3/1.33 from Howson, Domestic Monetary Management, Appendix 1,

Table 1).

Yield on Consols: Capie and Webber, A Monetary History, Table III.10.

Retail Sales: Capie and Collins, The Interwar British Economy, Table 2.22.

25

Table A1. Control Variable Estimates from Equations (1) and (2).

(1) (2)

2 tex 0.0453 [7.1] 0.0889 [17.4]

3 tex 0.0299 [7.0] –

4 tex -0.0249 [6.4] –

3 tmm 0.0331 [6.5] -0.0402 [7.3]

4 tmm 0.0747 [13.8] 0.0514 [8.4]

1 ttax -0.0118 [10.3] -0.0090 [27.6]

1 tR -0.0066 [3.2] -0.0077 [6.2]

1tun – -0.0053 [12.7]

2tun 0.0013 [5.0] -0.0056 [13.4]

3tun -0.0005 [2.0] –

Note: tex is export growth, tmm is the change in the money multiplier, ttax is the change in

the tax rate, tR is the change in the consol yield, and tun is the unemployment rate. Figure in

parentheses are robust t-ratios.

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